Bags with corner seals have been used to package a wide variety of consumer products, including granular laundry detergents. Such bags with corner seals deliver improved standability, thus displaying the products on shelf better versus other types of bags, e.g., gusset and pillow bags.
In terms of the manufacturing process, corner seals are usually achieved by folding a portion of the film forming the bag on itself and then sealing the overlapping surfaces of the film. The resulting corner seals are thicker than other areas of the bag and therefore are rigid enough to stand and support the bag.
However, such thicker corner seals increase the difficulty of opening the bag, particularly along a line of weakness. Lines of weakness have long been applied to bags for the purpose of easy opening, but the thicker corner seals stop the propagation of a tearing along a line of weakness. A user sometimes cannot open the bag without resorting to scissors, knives, or other inconvenient or dangerous ways of opening the bag. Alternatively, some proposed solutions lead to an uncontrolled tearing. The user may attempt to tear open a bag, resulting in the contents undesirably spilling out. This is particularly problematic in larger bags where the bag contains multiple doses of the consumer product and the user only intends to remove a single dose at a time. Some designs may even have led to pre-mature opening during distribution.
Thus, there is a need to provide an easy opening bag with corner seals, i.e., enabling a controlled tearing of the bag along a line of weakness including crossing a corner seal.
It is an advantage of the present invention to provide a bag with corner seals that withstands typical filling, packing, handing, and other distribution related processes, and yet is easily opened by the user.